Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), Ballade in A Minor (1898)
It is easy to confuse the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), but the similarity of their nationality and names is not coincidence—Coleridge-Taylor got “Taylor” from his father Daniel Taylor, and his mother named him “Samuel Coleridge” after Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born just over a neat 100 years before him. “Coleridge” was originally a middle name and not hyphenated, but he himself adopted the hyphenation after a misprint (hence his now customary last name, Coleridge-Taylor).
Coleridge-Taylor’s father was from Sierra Leone, and though he never knew his father, his African heritage played a significant role in his life. His entry as a mixed African-European into the classical music spheres of late nineteenth-century England was unusual to say the least. He studied violin and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music, with his talents supported by no less than Edward Elgar, through whose recommendation he received a commission in 1898 for the Ballade in A Minor. This piece was his first major success, for perhaps the same reasons audiences still enjoy its tuneful and vivid musical storytelling. A review from the premiere (quoted in daughter Avril’s biography of her father, p. 30), though, describing its “barbaric gaiety,” reveals how Coleridge-Taylor’s contemporaries pasted racist and stereotyped ideas onto a thoroughly European creation.
A more accurate connection for the Ballade in A Minor might be to Coleridge-Taylor’s namesake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, published in 1798, in a collection called Lyrical Ballads. Though we are lacking any explicit statements from Coleridge-Taylor about the poem as a reference, 1898 was the centenary of this most famous work of his deliberate namesake, and the two works share a genre designation—whether poems, songs, or instrumental works, ballad(e)s are always narrative, storytelling works (and the spelling variation is not significant).
Moreover, much like Coleridge’s poem, Coleridge-Taylor’s ballade unfolds in episodic sections (stanzas if you will) with multiple recurring motifs, including the themes of the stormy opening, which cleverly transition into the themes of lushly romantic contrasting episodes. Even if Coleridge-Taylor did not intend his ballade as an exact setting of the Ancient Mariner, the comparison provides a useful listening framework, as Michael-Thomas Foumai (composer-in-residence, Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra) has also pointed out. Building on Foumai’s observation of the “churning Verdi-kissed twister of chromatic turmoil” that opens the piece, it’s not a stretch to hear the opening as sailors heroically battling a sea storm, and the later transformation of that same chromatic theme into sweet reflection, perhaps paralleling the ancient mariner’s transformation, as he is eventually able to see the once feared creatures of the sea as “happy living things! no tongue/Their beauty might declare:/A spring of love gushed from my heart,/And I blessed them unaware…”
The fame of Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A Minor was quickly eclipsed by his next work, the cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on The Song of Hiawatha by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor did three tours of the United States, and as he became increasingly interested in his own African heritage, African American liberation, and Pan-Africanism, he deliberately integrated African and African-diasporic themes and musical elements into his music, effectively taking back full control of any prior efforts of his audiences to “hear” his race.
Program Note by Dr. Eileen Mah ©2025
Carl Nielsen (1865–1931), Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1926)
With the first selection on this concert, we explored compelling reasons from both within and external to the music to make a musical-literary comparison between Coleridge-Taylor’s and Coleridge’s ballad(e)s, and how, at a minimum (even without definitive composer-intended connection), this provides an interesting path in to hearing the music. Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra presents a similar case.
Nielsen’s persistent interest in representing archetypes in his music has been widely noted—take, for example, the movement indications in his Symphony No. 2: Allegro collerico (choleric), Allegro comodo e flemmatico (phlegmatic), Andante malincolico (melancholic), and Allegro sanguineo – Marziale (sanguine). After the success of his wind quintet from 1922, which likewise famously features each of the five instruments as a unique character type, Nielsen intended to write a full concerto for each instrument, though he ended up completing only the ones for flute and clarinet (Elly Bruunshuus Petersen, Carl Nielsen Edition, “Concertos”).
David Fanning and Michelle Assay have laid out plausible connections between the flute concerto and two very specific characters in their fascinating analysis of Nielsen’s lifelong relationship to the works of Shakespeare. Nielsen’s 1916 incidental music for a tercentenary Shakespeare celebration included songs for Caliban and Ariel from The Tempest, and he spoke of also wanting to write instrumental works for each of their contrasting temperaments. Fanning and Assay hypothesize the flute concerto as Nielsen’s realization of this idea, especially given its famous and very distinctive dialogue/arguments between solo flute (Ariel) and bass trombone (Caliban) (Carl Nielsen Studies 6).
In The Tempest, Caliban and Ariel represent antithetical archetypes, as they are both Prospero’s servants, but Caliban is a savage monster, while Ariel is an airy spirit. In the end, as the various conflicts of the plot are resolved, Prospero sets Ariel free, but Caliban’s fate is less clear, and varyingly interpreted. In spite of the countless Caliban spin-offs that demonstrate his enduring status as perhaps the most interesting character in the whole play, Nielsen’s flute-Ariel is clearly the protagonist here. Nielsen’s concerto is full of virtuosic opportunities for the soloist, but it isn’t exactly flashy. Rather, it is more an exquisite piece of chamber music and a character drama; specific character assignations aside, this concerto is best enjoyed by hearing the flute as main character, sometimes soliloquizing, but very often interacting with a variety of characters from the orchestra, among them bassoon, clarinet, horn, timpani, violin, and bass trombone, which does seem to have a more antagonistic role than any of the others.
Nielsen integrates this drama into the usual concerto structure of a sonata-like first movement and a rondo-esque finale, both of which provide ample introspective melodies so that we don’t at all miss a conventional lyrical middle movement. Nielsen struggled with the ending to the second movement and re-wrote it, even after the premiere of the piece. Notably, after many tense episodes and other twists of mood, both movements find their way to peaceful resolution. The transcendence of the first movement’s ending almost takes the listener by surprise (even if the program notes describe it ahead of time!), and the ending of the second—with final utterances by both flute and bass trombone—leaves us wondering if we just heard a bit of wry humor.
Program Note by Dr. Eileen Mah ©2025
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 (1877)
Comparisons between Brahms and Beethoven have been common ever since Brahms revealed his anxious admiration for Beethoven’s music. Brahms came late to symphonic writing, partly because of the awe, amounting almost to intimidation, that he felt for the nine masterpieces of his great predecessor. The relationship of Brahms’s first two symphonies has been likened to that between Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. In each case, the composer followed a work of heroism and pathos in a darkly minor key, painfully produced after much labor, with a piece of a somewhat lighter, more delicate nature in a major key that seems to have flowed from his pen with disarming ease. Indeed, Brahms’s Second Symphony might well be thought of as his own “Pastoral.”
It would be a mistake, however, to view the D Major Symphony merely as a “resting up,” a harmlessly agreeable interlude before the seriousness of Brahms’s final symphonic efforts. As in most of his music, there is in this Symphony more than a hint of the tragic elements that, for Brahms, underlay even the sunniest of moods. Here, too, the composer is true to the pattern of his other three symphonies in surrounding the loosely connected inner movements with powerful and majestic outer movements pregnant with crescendos and fortes to lend weight and moment to the occasion.
In an age of programmatic extravaganzas demanding huge orchestral resources, Brahms chose for his symphonies the standard classical orchestra, largely of strings with doubled woodwinds. This orchestration provides his works with a clarity and individuality of inner parts and a finely etched lucidity of expression that his more “modern” contemporaries derided as “old-fashioned.” Brahms’s purpose, however, was in part to redeem music from what he saw as the decadence and excess expressed in the music of Tchaikovsky and especially of Wagner.
Not long after the completion of his controversial First Symphony in 1876 Brahms laid plans for his Second. As often with him, he found inspiration in the mountain air, spending the summer in the Carinthian Alps. There he wrote the greater part of the Symphony, completing it in just four months. The premiere in Vienna was successful, although the work suffered a bit by critical comparison with its grander predecessor. Brahms was his usual self-deprecating self, referring to his new work as merely a “collection of waltzes,” and later commenting, “Whether or not I have a pretty symphony I do not know. For this I must ask wiser persons!”
The Symphony is in the usual four movements. The first, allegro non troppo, opens with a simple three-note “motto” theme in the lower strings that is repeated throughout the movement. An even simpler bucolic tune in the horns and woodwinds is further developed by the violins. Two gentle themes follow in the upper strings and cellos and, after their further development, the embellished “motto” theme returns.
The second movement, adagio non troppo, makes explicit the tragic undertones hinted at elsewhere in the Symphony. There are three themes, the outer two grave and reflective in a way never far from the surface in Brahms, even at his most lyrical.
This mood is dissipated, however, by the gay and rustic third movement, allegretto grazioso, an intermezzo with two faster trios. The first trio is reminiscent of a Hungarian folk dance. The opening oboe solo-simple, sweet, melancholy-recalls the minuet in his youthful D Major Serenade, one of his loveliest orchestral works.
The pastoral reveries of this interlude are dispelled by the exuberant optimism of the Finale, allegro con spirito. The movement opens with a jaunty tune in the strings that is expanded by the winds. The second subject recalls a Scottish dance. The critic Hanslick was reminded here of Brahms’s affinity for Mozart. Even here, however, we are not without residual elements of tragedy.
One critic called the D Major Symphony a “great, wonderful, tragic idyll.” For the newcomer it is a compelling way to meet the music of Brahms. For the devotee it remains one of his most congenial compositions.
The RSO has visited the Brahms Second Symphony five times previously: Manfred Blum in 1963 and 1977, Thomas Elefant in 1985, and guest conductor Anne Harrigan in 1996, and Guy Bordo in 2009.
© Robert M. Johnstone 2008